The book is at its best when it takes a long deep look into the things that are knowable, such as the history of this field, and the passages on Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s classic book, Entretiens Sur La Pluralité Des Mondes (Conversations On The Plurality Of Worlds), one of the first science books specifically aimed at a mass audience by not being written in Latin, but in French. The book also shines when taking a look at attempts to fabricate life, from the Miller-Urey experiments on. When he is on familiar turf, Grinspoon is practically giddy and this makes for a light and fun read.
The only times the book bogs down is when he delves too deeply into scientific minutia (mostly in the book’s second section) that, while important to the overall theme of the book, takes the reader away from the proverbial ‘larger picture,’ and gives a bit too much credence to fringe ideas, like James Lovelock’s and Lynn Margulis’s Gaia Hypothesis, while being a little too dismissive of other fringe ideas, such as UFO enthusiasts' arguments in favor of their cause, because he simply plays right into their paranoia about ‘respectable’ scientists all being co-opted by some black ops scheme. Grinspoon might do well to heed his own admonition about ‘the gaps in our data may be filled by our desires, by the power of suggestion, and by the undeniable force of consensus in forming opinions.’
Another slight distraction in Lonely Planets is when Grinspoon writes of a famous astronaut who seems to buy into the UFO true believers’ claims, and is deemed a bit loopy by Grinspoon and others. I don’t know if he was threatened with a lawsuit, or not, but it’s obvious from the context that Grinspoon is referring to Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo 14 astronaut. The reason for the oddity is that Mitchell has always been up front and publicly open about his belief in the paranormal, so anything that Grinspoon could state would not be taken as defamatory in the least. Grinspoon even manages to work the offbeat old Soviet quasi-religious idea of cosmism into the mix; not to mention the equally dubious idea of scientism.
Having noted all these factors, it should not be in the least bit surprising that the book’s subtitle is called The Natural Philosophy Of Alien Life. Natural philosopher, after all, was what most of the pre-Industrial revolution era scientists were called in their day. It has only been since the onset of scientific modernism that science fully branched off from philosophy, into the realm of the testable, and the ascendance of the scientific method, doubtlessly the greatest invention in the history of mankind.
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